Ah, 20th September: 109th anniversary of the birth of Kenneth More, beloved, solid, silver-screen embodiment of British heroism — and a man whose first job in showbusiness was stopping people wanking in a nudie theatre.
He started work in the early 1930s as a stagehand at the Windmill Theatre in London, famous for its ‘tableaux vivants’ — naked women standing still, so as not to upset the Lord Chamberlain. He tells the story in his 1978 autobiography, More or Less:
The Windmill had a strict rule that no member of the audience could bring in … ‘artificial aids to vision’, such as telescopes, binoculars or opera glasses. Despite this, one regular visitor, an ex-sea-captain, would come in regularly and sit in the front row of the circle, pull a telescope out of an attaché case, steady it with his left hand, and play with himself with his right. Other men, usually wearing raincoats, would place The Evening News and The Times on their laps and do the same thing under the newspaper. More dignified customers of this kind would sit, similarly engaged, with their bowler hats on their laps. This sort of behaviour … might result in our licence being revoked if anyone complained to the police about it.
Not wanting to be shut down, the theatre had a system in place for dealing with the matter:
I was told to keep a lookout for these undesirable activities and I had a simple code with the front office when I spotted anything. I would pick up the house telephone and say: ‘A4, Wanker, Times. C 17, Daily Mail.”
The commissionaire would then stride down the aisle to Seat A4, and then to Seat C 17, tap the man on the shoulder, and say, ‘The manager wishes to see you in his office.”
The commissionaire, an old soldier, was under strict instructions not to say ‘Stop wanking’, or some other more forthright comment, in case there had been a misunderstanding, or the client denied the charge. His defence could be, ‘I was just scratching myself,’ or something like that. But always the men concerned realised they had been rumbled, buttoned up their flies and left quietly. Some of these customers would even arrive wearing overcoats with both pockets removed so they could reach themselves more easily.
More recently, on the joyous Barry Cryer podcast, Stephen Fry told the story of when the Douglas Bader impersonator was propositioned by Noël Coward, a conversation which went something like this:
